Semafor · Oct 8, 2026 · 55m · 41m saved
With Doug Ostrover, Co-CEO and Chairman of Blue Owl Capital · Marc Lipschultz, Co-CEO of Blue Owl Capital
Blue Owl's loan losses over the last 10 years come to 12 basis points, Doug Ostrover said, against 60 to 100 basis points in the syndicated loan market.
Investors have spent the past year asking for their money back from Blue Owl's funds and its peers', and the firms have had to limit redemptions. The two co-CEOs said the loans are performing and the market has the story wrong.
"And so, we're at this weird point right now where performance is good, yet in the market there's this perception that things are really bad." — Doug Ostrover
Doug Ostrover, who co-founded Blackstone's credit arm GSO Capital Partners in 2005, and Marc Lipschultz, who spent more than two decades at KKR running its energy and infrastructure business, co-founded Owl Rock, the predecessor of Blue Owl's credit platform. They spoke together on Compound Interest from Semafor Business, their first joint interview in a long time.
The full interview is covered here so you can skip it. 55 minutes of audio, 14 minutes of reading.
Here are the 14 arguments that matter.
Key Takeaways
Performance is good but the market thinks it is bad, and Blue Owl blames itself for not explaining
About 98% of Blue Owl's revenue is management fees, not carry or transaction fees
The semi-liquid credit fund earned more than 9%, 600 basis points ahead of a public high-yield fund
Investors should expect periods when they have to wait for their money
Blue Owl does not mark its own loans: an outside pricing service sets every mark and the firm accepts it
Only 3 negative years for leveraged loans from 1990 to 2026, and none was large
Zero rates were the abnormal period, Lipschultz said, and today's rates are the normal one
Blue Owl's data center bet is a bet on tenant credit, not on which AI model wins
Hyperscalers sign 20-year leases; a borrower without one needs a guarantor
The co-CEOs ruled out taking the company private with the stock at $9
A new secondaries fund aimed for about $2 billion and raised more than $3 billion
1. Perception Versus Reality
A host said Blue Owl was the poster child for private credit on the way up and, fairly or not, the face of its stress over the past year. Asked what he is seeing, Ostrover said there is a big gap between what is happening in private credit and what the market thinks.
The asset class is doing well, and the firm expects strong results over the next 18 months
Ostrover said that before the interview he and Lipschultz had asked themselves what they missed. Their answer was First Brands, an auto parts company that did not borrow in the direct lending market, went bankrupt and, he believes, involved fraud. It became a watershed moment anyway, and he said the industry should have done more to help people understand the market.
"I've been in the loan business for almost 40 years. It's all I've ever done." — Doug Ostrover
What Blue Owl did, he said, was take the syndicated loan, the kind arranged by banks and sold to many lenders, and make it safer with higher returns.
Direct lending is only about a third of Blue Owl's business
Lipschultz said the market treats direct lending and Blue Owl as interchangeable. The firm's fastest-growing business is real assets. He added that a rising rate environment, a strong economy and uncertainty ahead are the conditions in which direct lending does best, and that institutions are moving into the asset class.
